Victorio

We reached our headquarters at Isleta after being out five days and traveling two hundred and twenty-two miles, sustaining no other damage than a few bruises from scaling the mountain and the loss of Sergeant Swilling's horse.

This first brush with Apaches, however, was but a prelude to other expeditions after this tribe, and we were soon hot on the trail of Victorio, the Apache Napoleon.

End of chapter twelve.

Chapter fifteen of Six Years with the Texas Rangers, 1875 to 1881.

For more information or how to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Six Years with the Texas Rangers, 1875 to 1881, by James B. Gillett.

Chapter fifteen, Scouting in Mexico.

About a month after our first brush with Apaches, during November 1879, Chief Victorio quit the Mescalero Reservation and with a party of one hundred and twenty-five warriors and a hundred women and children, traveled south into Mexico on a raid.

This old chief was probably the best general ever produced by the Apache tribe.

The San Carlos Reservation, where many bands had been concentrated, was a place of genuine misery, with inadequate food and water, with corrupt agents who stole the rations, with the concentration of traditional enemies in close quarters producing violence, with the systematic destruction of the way of life that had sustained the Apache for generations.

The leaders who led breakouts from the reservation, Victorio, Loco, Nana, and eventually Geronimo, were responding to real conditions, not acting from an innate savagery that the legend preferred.

Tom Horn understood this.

It is one of the genuinely remarkable things about him, that a young white man from Missouri, arriving in Arizona in the 1870s, developed through his language learning and his immersion in the Apache scout world an understanding of the Apache perspective that went beyond the simplistic enemy and combatant framing of the official Army position.

Many resisted.

The resulting conflicts eventually included famous Apache leaders such as Victorio, Nana, and Geronimo.

Geronimo surrendered in 1886, ending the last major organized armed resistance by Chiricahua Apache forces.

The Chiricahua people, including Apache scouts who had served the United States Army, were then removed from their homeland and held as prisoners of war.